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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Bad grammar is a bad idea',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/07/20.jpg" alt="House-building continues" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		I complained yesterday about Huckleberry Finn&apos;s grammar, but that&apos;s nothing compared to the horrid spelling used to convey Jim&apos;s accent.
		Reading that was torture.
		Once the dialogue stopped and I was back to reading the ill-grammared narrator&apos;s thoughts, the material became much easier to read.
		I&apos;m not sure if the grammar slightly improved or if I&apos;d just gotten used to the uneducated writing style by that point.
	</p>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It&apos;s kind of hard to tell what&apos;s going on in the book with such bad grammar.
			I understand it&apos;s supposed to make the characters more lifelike, as they&apos;re probably uneducated and don&apos;t speak properly, but when I&apos;m struggling to make sense of the sentences, forget getting drawn in.
			The scene isn&apos;t even being painted properly in my mind!
		</p>
		<p>
			I don&apos;t see the moral dilemma even going down when I read Chapter Eight.
			From the other material presented this week, it looks like the problem is that Finn doesn&apos;t want to hurt his friend, so he doesn&apos;t want to turn him in for running away (Twain, 1884), but a law makes it illegal to refrain from turning him in.
			The video suggests that Finn thinks a god would want him to turn in his friend, but that he&apos;s willing to go to hell to avoid ratting him out (Darwall, n.d.).
			Nothing in the text even mentions a god or hell, so I&apos;m unsure where the video got this idea.
			Rereading, it seems Finn mentions being labelled as an abolitionist, but that doesn&apos;t seem like something Finn would view as negative, and no legal or moral implications are made in light of this.
		</p>
		<p>
			In Chapter Twelve, Finn attempts to reverse-engineer morality.
			He tries to put together incompatible moral systems to form one to use with the given situation, so he can feel good about doing what it takes to survive.
			What he comes up with doesn&apos;t actually make sense.
			He puts back some of the foods he doesn&apos;t like (Twain, 1884), even though he&apos;s already picked them and this food is going to die.
			Some of what he put back wasn&apos;t ripe yet.
			So he picked crops prematurely, preventing their usefulness at harvest time, and this is somehow okay.
			Even the ripe stuff he put back will go unnoticed and spoil.
			By putting stuff back, he&apos;s ensured he won&apos;t get use from it, but by picking it in the first place, he&apos;s already irreversibly stolen it, even if he puts it back.
		</p>
		<p>
			A second ethical dilemma is present in Chapter Twelve as well.
			Finn stays on board the ship out of curiosity, and overhears plans of murder.
			He decides to try to save the victim and get the attempted murderers arrested by the sheriff in the process.
			He wanted to save a life and get two attempted murderers put away, and didn&apos;t have any reservations about doing so.
			It was cut and dry.
			However, the second dilemma we were looking for was that dealt with by the murderers though.
			They wanted to ice this guy who&apos;d threatened them one to many times and that they perceived was about to kill them.
			In self-defence, they caught the guy off-guard and tied him up.
			They didn&apos;t want to kill him though.
			They wanted him dead, but they didn&apos;t want to be the terrible people to do the deed.
			They chose to leave the guy in a situation in which he&apos;d necessarily die, while still being tied up and unable to get out of the situation.
			In so doing, they reasoned that they didn&apos;t actually kill the guy (Twain, 1884), even though they did.
			They were attempting to exploit a perceived loophole that would allow themselves to do something without doing that thing.
		</p>
		<p>
			I guess the closest I can relate to one of these would be the first one, which occurs in Chapter Eight.
			In the past, I&apos;ve knowingly performed illegal actions for a friend or family member, in cases in which the law is unjust and I could help someone out.
			Obviously though, I can&apos;t go into detail because said actions were illegal.
			In terms of Kantian ethics, obeying the law is a hypothetical imperative.
			I obey the law because it leads to better results, not because it&apos;s the morally right thing to do.
			In fact, many unjust laws exist, and in the case of unjust laws, it&apos;s imperative that I break them when the need arises to fulfil the obligations set forth by a categorical imperative, or at least fulfil another hypothetical imperative that supersedes that of obeying an unjust law.
		</p>
		<p>
			(Before you ask, the discussion assignment says to make <strong>*two*</strong> posts, not one.
			At first, yes, it says two topics.
			But look at where the second topic is introduced; it talks about the <strong>*second topic post*</strong>, just as it did last week, meaning that there is a <strong>*second post*</strong>.
			My discussion on categorical imperatives is in the next main post down.)
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				Darwall, S. (n.d.). Ethics: God and Morality, Part 1. Retrieved from <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/wi-phi/wiphi-value-theory/wiphi-ethics/v/god-morality-part-1"><code>https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/wi-phi/wiphi-value-theory/wiphi-ethics/v/god-morality-part-1</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Twain, M. (1884, December 10). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Retrieved from <a href="https://contentserver.adobe.com/store/books/HuckFinn.pdf"><code>https://contentserver.adobe.com/store/books/HuckFinn.pdf</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			One of my own personal categorical imperatives is this: <strong>I must not cause human death.</strong>
			I believe blame for death rests not with those that take life away, but with those that create life knowing it must one day die.
			When your parents made you, they knew that if they did so, you&apos;d be forced to stop existing one day.
			I believe ceasing to exist is a fate worse than never having existed, because you necessarily must lose everything you ever had and everything you ever were.
			But if you never existed, you&apos;d have nothing to lose.
			Therefore, when I say I must not cause death, that means I must never create life unless I somehow believe that life to be immortal.
			And of course, I don&apos;t believe any such thing.
			Therefore, I must never create children of my own under any circumstances.
			If we look at this as a universal law as Kant suggests we do, we end up with a world in which the human species dies out.
			We go extinct.
			No more human deaths occur ever, because we&apos;re all already gone.
			We become the first species to <strong>*choose*</strong> its own extinction.
			Nature begins recovering from the damage we&apos;ve caused, too.
			It&apos;ll take a while to undo all the harm we&apos;ve caused, but the planet will eventually get there if we&apos;re not here to keep mucking things up as badly as we do.
		</p>
		<p>
			As for my culture, I&apos;m a part of free culture; a culture of giving, sharing, and reuse.
			For those truly and totally indoctrinated into the culture, such as I am, the main categorical imperative is probably this: <strong>we must never release works into the public without a license that promotes and allows reuse, redistribution, and resale, as long as laws would otherwise cause use of the work to encounter those restrictions.</strong>
			There is no excuse for violating this rule.
			While other cultures, such as variants of popular culture found around the world, have no such rule, this rule represents one of the driving forces behind free culture.
			We believe copyright to be censorship, and censorship to be wrong.
			We believe all works are derivative, and no ideas are truly original.
			We believe that innovation stagnates when we&apos;re not allowed to build off the past.
			And most of all, we believe that ideas are not objects, and cannot be owned.
			Of course, if this became a universal law as Kant suggested we theorise when constructing a categorical impactive, copyright and patent law would fall into disuse, assuming they weren&apos;t outright abolished.
			Culture and technology would flourish.
			Market competition would increase, as more companies work at improving manufacturing methods of the same items.
			There would be no monopolies; companies would be forced to issue fair prices and provide customer support for their products.
			This is a world many of us in free culture dream of fondly.
			Being that it&apos;s a categorical imperative for me, all my work is released under one free license or another.
			In the case of the coursework I submit, it&apos;s all backed up in an archive that will be released under the terms of the $a[GNU] {$a['GPLv3+']} on 2023-01-01, though censorship (complete with a take-down notice) from the school prevents it from being released before that time.
		</p>
		<p>
			(Before you ask, the discussion assignment says to make <strong>*two*</strong> posts, not one.
			At first, yes, it says two topics.
			But look at where the second topic is introduced; it talks about the <strong>*second topic post*</strong>, just as it did last week, meaning that there is a <strong>*second post*</strong>.
			My discussion on Huckleberry Finn is in the next main post up.)
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
